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The Online Museum: a “Placeless” Space of the “Civic Laboratory”*

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The Online Museum: a “Placeless” Space of the “Civic Laboratory”* The Online Museum: A “Placeless” Space of the “Civic Laboratory”* Natalia Grincheva Abstract: Building on Tony Bennett’s (1995) understanding of a museum as a “civic laboratory,” this study advances this framework by researching a museum space in a virtual world. It shows that an online museum can be understood as a “placeless” space of a “civic laboratory” by analyzing visitor research methodologies that are utilized online. Through comparison of traditional museum-visitor research tools and methods with the ones that online museum spaces employ, this article seeks to demonstrate that the online museum environment is equipped with a plethora of tools that make it a laboratory-type research setting where visitor studies are conducted. The analysis reveals that the historical development of online museum-audience research has gone through methodological stages similar to those of traditional visitor research. [Keywords: Museum Exhibitions, Research, Theory, Methodology, Evaluation, Ethnography, Behaviorism, Communications Theory. Keywords in italics are derived from the American Folklore Society Ethnographic Thesaurus, a standard nomenclature for the ethnographic disciplines.] In recent decades, many museums around the world have been actively engaged in establishing an online presence. These virtual museum spaces have been constructed through developing institutional sites on the Internet that provide information about collections or by building interactive environments for presentational, educational, entertainment, or communication purposes. Thus, the term “online museum” is quite broad and inclusive and may refer to a wide spectrum of virtual-museum representations on the Internet. These spaces may include interactive online galleries, virtual three-dimensional museum simulators, museum Web 2.0 profiles on blogs, and social network sites as well as a range of other online and mobile applications that museums have developed to provide interactive activities for their audiences. Considering the diversity of implied meanings, it is important to give a working definition to the term “online museum” before I proceed with the article. In my research, I would like to focus first of all on the communication dimension of physical museums in a virtual world. By “communication dimension,” I mean different online two-way communication settings (social media institutional accounts or profiles, museum blogs, and interactive online collections) that allow audiences to interact with digital museum content and communicate with curators or managers. Thus, within the scope of the present research, the term “online museum” refers to an official Internet representation of a museum on the social web, which serves as an important * This peer-reviewed reviewed contribution was accepted for publication in Museum Anthropology Review on June 19, 2013. The work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Museum Anthropology Review 8(1) Spring 2014 communication tool that connects the general public with the physical museum and its online collections. Although new media technologies advanced communication between museums and the public by providing a new means for connection and information exchange, they further problematized a task of museums that has always been important to their institutional nature. This task is to conduct social research on museum visitors that reflects the core function of a museum as a political actor of discipline and control (Bennett 1995). Museums are among the most closely monitored institutional spaces, in which managers employ a number of quantitative and qualitative techniques to observe visitor attendance and behavior. Drawing on the conceptual framework of a laboratory science that Austrian sociologist Karin Knorr-Cetina (1999:38) developed, Tony Bennett (2005) stresses that museums can be understood as “civic laboratories” in that they serve as political sites for national ideology production and promotion by providing a specific public space where “civic experiments” directed at target populations are carefully designed and monitored (2005:525). Museums, like laboratories, are “social and political structures that ‘belong’ to their heads in the sense that they are attributed to them and identified with them” (Knorr-Cetina 1999:39). This connection to a larger political structure makes museums accountable social-political building blocks that constitute their significance through acceptable political measurements and evaluation mechanisms. In this sense, museum-visitor research is a core means of political reporting on social progress and performance within larger national communities. Online museums, as an important representational extension of physical institutions in a virtual world, are also heavily involved in conducting constant monitoring of and research on their audiences on the Internet. Thus, online museum spaces, like physical sites, can be understood as major virtual laboratories. Stressing the main aspects of laboratory science that Knorr-Cetina identified, Bennett points out that museums, like laboratories, are not “natural” settings but rather are experimental spaces in which interactions between people and objects “can be arranged for the purpose of both continuous and comparative study” (2005:8). Likewise, in online museum spaces, the “virtual” visitor experience is structured similarly to the “real” visitor experience (Wilson 2011:373). On the one hand, in an online environment, a visitor can be conceived of “as a spatial wanderer, traversing information and freely selecting trajectories and viewpoints,” thus making museum online narratives less directed, linear, and hierarchical than they are in physical exhibition spaces (Cameron 2003:337). On the other hand, cultural theorist Jean-François Lyotard (1984) argues that the notion that digital media foster a democratic relationship between users and institutions through access, interactivity, and multiple narratives is a mere wishful thinking. Instead, he insists that new technologies continue to support established power relationships. Cultural researcher Fiona Cameron stresses that web-design interface and hyperlinking shape visitor behavior online and direct users through a predetermined arrangement of various arguments and counterarguments. In a virtual world, mental processes such as reflection, association, and problem-solving “are materialized rather than internalized through these various modes of representation” (Cameron 2003:337). These materialized cognitive processes result in clicking through links, browsing pages, enlarging details of digital artifacts, and manipulating views of objects. Furthermore, the traces of these online actions are constantly recorded through various 2 Museum Anthropology Review 8(1) Spring 2014 web applications and can serve as an advanced database of evidence that illustrates visitor behaviors online. In this way, the online museum is not only a mode of representation of a physical museum but also a device that records online visitor-behavior data and a social laboratory where “civic” experiments take place. Building on the understanding of a museum as a civic laboratory, I aim in this paper to advance this framework by researching a museum space in a virtual world. I intend to show that an online museum can be understood as a “placeless” (Kohler 2002:8) space of a civic laboratory by focusing on the analysis of visitor-research methodologies that museums utilize online. By comparing traditional museum-visitor research tools and methods with the ones that are employed in online museum spaces, this paper seeks to show that the online museum environment is equipped with a plethora of tools that make it a laboratory-type research setting in which visitor studies are conducted. My analysis demonstrates that the historical development of online museum-audience research has gone through methodological stages similar to those through which traditional visitor research has passed. In traditional visitor research, methodology advanced from the simple quantification of visitor characteristics to complex ethnographic observations that aim at analyzing and interpreting visitors’ behaviors in their interactions with objects in a museum setting as well as with each other. This progression is analogous to the evolution of online audience research, which opened with web statistics analytics and has developed to a more comprehensive analysis of online audience engagement with virtual museum content. However, this evolution in both environments refers back to the development of the conception of a museum as a political entity. This political nature of a museum promoted historical progress in advancing research tools and methodologies for the development of the civic laboratory, where social surveillance and manipulation is exercised. This paper aims to map the evolution of museum-audience research in its historical development through comparative analysis of visitor-research methods that I present in several stages: Quantitative Approach, Behavioral Studies, and Qualitative Enquiry. Each of these sections provides details on the different categories of visitor-research methodologies, comparing and contrasting how researchers utilize them in the physical-museum environment versus the virtual world. Also, each of the sections seeks to reflect the methodological profile of a museum on its laboratorial nature
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